Some games among highly regarded on Codex have so much trash that DAO's darkspawn would seem extinct - Wizardry 8 and Might & Magic 6 come to mind, only from what I have replayed recently.
Trash mobs or inflicting the player with huge dumps of text to lengthen the game - which is worse?
The tolerability of trash mobs is directly proportional to how quickly you can dispose of them.
At least M&M 6 has relatively fast combat and you can slay your way through trash mobs in seconds.
Most of the more or less modern games include difficulty options that allow you quickly fly through any amounts of trash encounters. But instead of choosing one that feels "right" for enjoyable gameplay, often fast paced, some tryhards put all RPGs on hardest and bitch about encounter design degradation and inflated HP/enemy numbers.
Change "some players" to "a very small minority of players".Congratulations, you just made the game longer but ensured that some players will quit the game out of tedium, and it's unlikely anyone will ever re-play the game because of how tedious it is to go through!
So, designing every encounter at least x3 times is not detrimental to a game's length and quality (x3 testing too) but allowing a player to make an informed choice is?
You have never seen me complain about such trivial shit,mate !Just be like fantadomat - story mode+cheat engine and you can handle any amount of enemies!
Change "some players" to "a very small minority of players".Congratulations, you just made the game longer but ensured that some players will quit the game out of tedium, and it's unlikely anyone will ever re-play the game because of how tedious it is to go through!
Dragon Age Origins & 2 have a completion rate of around 40%, which is high for RPGs. Compare that to a game with better combat encounters like Divinity OS, which is at 9%.If you look at Steam achievement acquisition rates you can see that many, many players do not finish games but drop them halfway through.
Story-based achievements that unlock during the main quest are a great way of tracking that.
In most games, you have, say, 80-90% of players finishing the first quest (the other 10-20% have bought but not yet installed the game), and then it starts to drop off. Once you reach the game's midpoint you will have a larger dropoff with plenty of players abandoning the game, and only a minority of players actually finish the game.
No, designing every encounter meticulously is not detrimental to a game's quality at all. An encounter that was tested and revised 3 times, with different party compositions and different approaches to handling it, is going to be supremely enjoyable.
Of course, but do they have sufficient time and money to achieve that? If yes, then they should and if they fail to deliver we are justified in our disappointment and infernal ire (e.g. against PoE), if no, then we get to all those rpgs that has simplified encounters, since this is what they could possibly afford.No, designing every encounter meticulously is not detrimental to a game's quality at all. An encounter that was tested and revised 3 times, with different party compositions and different approaches to handling it, is going to be supremely enjoyable.
Perhaps you are right, but don't forget the significant difference in player power level between the two games. In BG1 they had to consider that the player is laughably weak, can't even hit things all that well, let alone cast spells and use various consumables and magic items, as such, encounters skewed toward the 'melée attack' type enemies. Perhaps they could have copypasted less black talon elites and skeletons into some forest areas, but that's it. In BG2 the player has a vastly bigger pool of options in combat, so consequently creature variability, their powers, immunities and resistances went up a lot, plus those lovely hard counters.It's a big reason of why I prefer Baldur's Gate 2 to Baldur's Gate 1. The first game has more open exploration but also more boring copypasted encounters, while the second game has more mage duels, beholders, illithids, etc etc. Every dungeon in BG2 has different enemy types, there's a lot of variety, nothing ever feels copypasted. Sure, it also has some trashmobs, but it doesn't abuse them to the point that it becomes tedious.
Yes, it is very tedious now to still see those difficulty sliders with '+50% health to monsters' and 'monsters do double damage' levels, that's why I'd advocate the option-by-option approach e.g. Supergiant Games do this very well for all their games. In a party-based fantasy rpg I can totally imagine that you have a 'General Difficulty' settings and even a 'Class Specific Difficulty' settings. Imagine you can handpick e.g. Rest Difficulty: the easiest being that you can Rest anywhere outside of combat, the hardest is that you can only rest at Inns. Or that you can choose between the true Vancian spellcasting á la BG Wizards or you can simply opt into an easier approach á la BG2 Sorcerer, provided you have a game with just 1-2 caster classes. There are just so many things that should be adjustable separately, especially in a single-player game.The only acceptable difficulty levels are those that were designed by hand rather than automatically upscaled. So, something like "At hard difficulty this specific encounter has 2 enemy wizards instead of 1, and 2 additional melee dudes to shield them" is good, but "At hard difficulty enemies just get +X % to damage and HP" is shit.
Perhaps you are right, but don't forget the significant difference in player power level between the two games. In BG1 they had to consider that the player is laughably weak, can't even hit things all that well, let alone cast spells and use various consumables and magic items, as such, encounters skewed toward the 'melée attack' type enemies. Perhaps they could have copypasted less black talon elites and skeletons into some forest areas, but that's it. In BG2 the player has a vastly bigger pool of options in combat, so consequently creature variability, their powers, immunities and resistances went up a lot, plus those lovely hard counters.
Dragon Age Origins was the game that left me with trash mob PTSD. I finished it because I wanted to get through the ending after investing so much time in it, but at the end I just felt drained. So many copypasted encounters...
I wonder if there is an RPG with more consistently excellent encounter design than BG2. DeArnise keep is probably my Top 1 RPG dungeon of all time.Sure, you have a point, but then I'd argue that low level D&D isn't all that great and mid-level is where it's at (which is my general opinion on the matter - levels 5-15 are the most fun in D&D, anything below that is too chance-based and has too few options, and anything above that has the issue of HP bloat).
Still, that in itself does not force bad encounter design. After all, you can have quests give plenty of XP so you reach the interesting levels more quickly, and BG does have some great encounters, such as those in Durlag's Tower (which admittedly is at the end of the game's power curve).
Also, encounters with a couple of melee and a couple of ranged enemies aren't bad as long as they're not copypasted to infinity. The main issue BG1 had was its structure, with the open exploration of entirely generic and un-noteworthy woodland areas that consisted of 50% empty space and 50% generic trash encounters. BG2, on the other hand, focused on more interesting dungeons with unique layouts and enemy compositions that always mixed things up.
I can totally agree with that since this is an inherent shortcoming of d&d. Yet if anything, we cannot blame BG's makers for being far too meticulous in emulating d&d and RAW, not to mention that it was their very first attempt of it, and they managed to improve upon virtually everything for BG2 (which in current year is almost unheard of).Sure, you have a point, but then I'd argue that low level D&D isn't all that great and mid-level is where it's at (which is my general opinion on the matter - levels 5-15 are the most fun in D&D, anything below that is too chance-based and has too few options, and anything above that has the issue of HP bloat).
But gaining levels quicker would hurt the pacing, no? Even in vanilla BG1 I sometimes felt like I gained levels too quickly, but maybe this was just me. And yes, I forgot to mention that even in BG1 we had great examples for good encounter design (albeit, mostly with the expansions), and its also important to stress that a good designer uses every tool in their disposal i.e. creature, environment and circumstances. At Durlag's Tower the Doom Guards utilize the narrowness of the path leading to the fort's backdoor, and a pair of moderately strong enemies suddenly become much more powerful by being able to slowly pummel at your weakest party-member lagging behind (and ironically, this uses the topography as well as the bad pathfinding, so they even managed to capitalize on their weakness, this is amazing).Still, that in itself does not force bad encounter design. After all, you can have quests give plenty of XP so you reach the interesting levels more quickly, and BG does have some great encounters, such as those in Durlag's Tower (which admittedly is at the end of the game's power curve).
Of course they aren't bad, especially in IE, and one can argue they could have taken it even further in difficulty (e.g. more hard counters, more immune creatures, etc...).Also, encounters with a couple of melee and a couple of ranged enemies aren't bad as long as they're not copypasted to infinity. The main issue BG1 had was its structure, with the open exploration of entirely generic and un-noteworthy woodland areas that consisted of 50% empty space and 50% generic trash encounters. BG2, on the other hand, focused on more interesting dungeons with unique layouts and enemy compositions that always mixed things up.
No. MM6/MM7/MM8 were not "trash mobs". There were huge mobs in MM6 and you had to hack your way through - some of those fights could take a long time. If anyone gave up on that game before level 10 or so may think that the game is non-stop trash fights. But there is no trash!Some games among highly regarded on Codex have so much trash that DAO's darkspawn would seem extinct - Wizardry 8 and Might & Magic 6 come to mind, only from what I have replayed recently.
You can pad HP bars too!Congratulations, you just made the game longer but ensured that some players will quit the game out of tedium, and it's unlikely anyone will ever re-play the game because of how tedious it is to go through!
Length is not a good indicator of quality by itself. If you make the game longer by adding trash mobs, you make the game less fun and players will wish the game was shorter.
You can pad HP bars too!Congratulations, you just made the game longer but ensured that some players will quit the game out of tedium, and it's unlikely anyone will ever re-play the game because of how tedious it is to go through!
Length is not a good indicator of quality by itself. If you make the game longer by adding trash mobs, you make the game less fun and players will wish the game was shorter.
Interesting notion, I have been thinking a lot on how to improve the existing HP systems but it really is a difficult task. The abstract HP concept is really good to provide a 'timer' in combat (aka if you cannot instakill or crit the opponent, you still finish them off eventually by many smaller hits), and if we'd break it up limb by limb I'm not sure it would be the best way to go. But I had an idea some time ago, which was inspired by 2e beholders in particular: so imagine a game where each and every creature has a different list of parameters that aims to simulate what happens with them upon a critical hit? As an example, let's use the beholder:I'm still waiting for a game that replaces HP bloat with something actually good (like Deux Ex style limb-based HP instead of one HP pool you gotta whittle down) but that's not going to happen because HP are such a standard, nobody even cares about improving it, so we're stuck with "lol harder enemies just have more HP lol"